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I go to a public school, one of the highest-ranking public schools in my state. I can state with absolute certainty that none of the actions described in the video has ever taken place in my entire schooling experience. When I spelled something wrong, the teachers made us correct it. 2+2 NEVER equaled 5. We never had to take any psychiatric evaluations. On the contrary, the school counselors are good people who help students with disabilities get equal opportunities in the classroom to learn. Whoever created this video is just pulling stuff out of thin air.

Around 8:00, the narrator says that the number of school psychologists in schools increased after a law was passed and cites specific numbers and dates. (However, he has no citations.) Then he adds that child murders and suicides have also gone up, but can't even tell us the numbers, statistics, or the timeframe. Correlation doesn't imply causation. Shrinks in schools do not make kids commit suicide, there are many other factors that can cause kids to become depressed.

Fluoride is not a "highly toxic industrial waste product" like the video claims. It is added to water for scientific reasons. The dose put in water supplies has been shown to reduce tooth decay and has no health side effects. He also claims that fluoride was the main ingredient of sarin gas used by the Nazis in WWII. I looked up sarin gas and found that one of the ingredients in it was methylphosphonyl difluoride (CH3POF2). Sodium fluoride (NaF), on the other hand, is what is used in water supplies.

Furthermore, the effects of fluoride are a matter of dose. The dose in the water supply will not hurt you. Eating enormous doses of fluoride every day will hurt you. The dangers of any substance vary with the dose; even water can lead to water poisoning if you drink too much of it.

He says that more people die from the flu vaccine than from the flu itself. Like usual, he provides no studies or evidence to support his claims. Vaccines have never been shown to cause neurological disorders or sickness, beyond that sore arm you get when you get stabbed in the arm with a needle.

Another claim is that the immune systems of babies cannot handle vaccines. This is nonsense. The amount of the virus contained in the vaccine is miniscule compared to the vast numbers of bacteria and viruses they encounter from the moment they're born. Being afraid of germs when you get a vaccine is like being afraid of getting your pinky toe wet when you're swimming in an ocean.

There hasn't been enough studies to show that GMO foods are bad for your health. I don't think they're necessarily bad for humans, but I am against companies copyrighting food (which is a different issue entirely).

The claims in this video are completely unverified and he provides no evidence whatsoever.

I think that part of the reason American public schools are on the slow side is probably because they're wasting their budgets on new flashy P.A. systems instead of textbooks, and the No Child Left Behind law that essentially forces the passing kids to be subject to lower standards of education because the non-passing kids didn't.

Also, I remember in my old school district, the schools were tired of large numbers of students failing exams year after year after year, so they kept lowering the standards each time. Finally, everyone got too cynical to accept it, so they kept the same test and gave it a new name. At my new school, the only major change in recent years was removing word problems from the math test because they put ESL students at a disadvantage.

The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Program...ent_Assessment
is an international comparison of students around the world. TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trends_..._Science_Study
is another major international comparison. What you find is that results vary enormously across the USA. Arkansas is comparable with African states. Massachusetts schools compare favorably with Japan, Korea, Taiwan or anywhere else in the world.

There are many issues with American schools. However, the best public schools produce results that are clearly comparable with schools anywhere. There is no evidence counter to this, despite what videos on Youtube may claim.

__________________I've seen it here and in several other places that there is no Illuminati. That doesn't even make sense. There's a Wikipedia entry that talks about it. I'm not saying that everything on Wikipedia is true, but if you read it, it's just really clear how the Illuminati controls the world.

The thing about fluoride is that the F- ion is extremely dangerous in certain couplings, as it passes right through every organic barrier, including skin, and then chalks out your bones, gives you chalk clots in your blood and a nice heart attacks.

Emphasis on certain couplings. For instance, the acid form of HF can kill you with a few drops on the skin. For reasons I don't entirely understand, NaF is much less potent (I suppose it has to do with the H+ ion protolyzing the water, affecting the coupling of the two ions, a chemist might give a better answer), and you need at least a few grams to kill a human.

It appears to be added in doses of about 2-5 milligrams per liter in most places with fluoridated water, so you'd die from water poisoning long before you could be harmed from the fluoride.

__________________"The president’s voracious sexual appetite is the elephant that the president rides around on each and every day while pretending that it doesn’t exist." - Bill O'Reilly et al., Killing Kennedy

He also claims that fluoride was the main ingredient of sarin gas used by the Nazis in WWII. I looked up sarin gas and found that one of the ingredients in it was methylphosphonyl difluoride (CH3POF2). Sodium fluoride (NaF), on the other hand, is what is used in water supplies.

Putting on my pedantic chemist hat, and ignoring all the woo, he's actually marginally right on this point. As with many largish organic molecules, there is more than one synthesis pathway to the end product. One pathway refluxes an intermediate product with sodium flouride as the final step. It's far from being the "main" ingredient, of course.

Chlorine is the main ingredient in chlorine gas. But your body really need Sodium Chloride and you produce HCl (hydrochloric acid) in your tummy. And the idjits who produced the You tube vid are, well, idjits. Same, by the by, re: Splenda having an H(IIRC) replaced with a Cl - and therefore giving you Chlorine poisoning. Riiiighhhht - just keeps the sugar molecule from fitting with the enzyme it needs to be digested - no fit, no digestion, no effect on weight or diabetes if ya gots it.

__________________There is no problem so great that it cannot be fixed by small explosives carefully placed.

Putting on my pedantic chemist hat, and ignoring all the woo, he's actually marginally right on this point. As with many largish organic molecules, there is more than one synthesis pathway to the end product. One pathway refluxes an intermediate product with sodium flouride as the final step. It's far from being the "main" ingredient, of course.

My husband is way down the rabbit hole again. And this two-year plus roller coaster with him (he fell down the hole in summer of 2008) has shown me that people who want to believe this stuff just won't respond to rationality, or if they do, they won't respond to it for long. When people want to believe things, there isn't a lot that facts can do to change their minds. It's like a religion. It struck me when he had some of the CT crap on last night, how the CT believers evangelize their cherished dogma. Their new word for "heretic" is "debunker."

Why would CTs want to believe these things without doing even the most rudimentary checking or making even the slightest attempt to educate themselves about science, politics, finance, history, etc.? Well, the reasons surely vary from individual to individual, but in my husband's case, I suspect he has a deep need to see the world as a Very Bad Place (a scapegoat for the disappointments of his life).

My husband is way down the rabbit hole again. And this two-year plus roller coaster with him (he fell down the hole in summer of 2008) has shown me that people who want to believe this stuff just won't respond to rationality, or if they do, they won't respond to it for long. When people want to believe things, there isn't a lot that facts can do to change their minds. It's like a religion. It struck me when he had some of the CT crap on last night, how the CT believers evangelize their cherished dogma. Their new word for "heretic" is "debunker."

Why would CTs want to believe these things without doing even the most rudimentary checking or making even the slightest attempt to educate themselves about science, politics, finance, history, etc.? Well, the reasons surely vary from individual to individual, but in my husband's case, I suspect he has a deep need to see the world as a Very Bad Place (a scapegoat for the disappointments of his life).

*hug* I actually believed everything my parents did, before I got a computer. Anyway, I prefer to keep a long list of all the stupid stuff they've said over the years. There's about 50 conspiracy theories and counting. Some of the crazier ones:

3. The tardy system in public schools is a conspiracy to get children accustomed to a New World Order so that they would have no problem being counted when the NWO plan finally comes to fruition.

14. Shows like CSI, Law & Order, and NCIS are actually propaganda pieces designed to make people think they have no Constitutional rights.

22. The evil pharmaceutical companies want to stop the guys who make Cheerios from advertising their product as capable of lowering cholesterol, because they want as many people to buy Lipitor as possible. They will accomplish this through the brainwashing effects of television to program people to buy more drugs.

31. Those "racist" signs held by Tea Party members aren't really held by Tea Party members, they're just undercover agents hired by the mainstream parties to show up and make the Tea Party Movement look bad.

Thanks for the hug! *Hugs* back. And you are to be commended for pulling yourself out of your parents' rabbit hole. My husband has pulled family members down his rabbit hole, and some of them, now staunch CTs, actively reinforce the nonsense, so it goes on and on, a mutual wackywoo society. Ick.

At least we don't fight about the stuff anymore. He knows I don't want any part of it -- I've made that clear in about 1,000,000,000,000,000, oh heck, a googolplex ways, I guess. And he finally got the message. We spend a lot of time apart these days; me doing my thing and him immersing himself in woo; sad, considering we're married, but it's better than listening to him endlessly rant and rave.

Thanks for the hug! *Hugs* back. And you are to be commended for pulling yourself out of your parents' rabbit hole. My husband has pulled family members down his rabbit hole, and some of them, now staunch CTs, actively reinforce the nonsense, so it goes on and on, a mutual wackywoo society. Ick.

At least we don't fight about the stuff anymore. He knows I don't want any part of it -- I've made that clear in about 1,000,000,000,000,000, oh heck, a googolplex ways, I guess. And he finally got the message. We spend a lot of time apart these days; me doing my thing and him immersing himself in woo; sad, considering we're married, but it's better than listening to him endlessly rant and rave.

Well, my mom is slightly better because she believes in vaccines and doubts 9/11 and many of his conspiracy theories. In fact, she thinks that the anti-vaxxing stuff is downright insulting to parents, kids, scientists, and people living with autism. But she believes more in the "Big Pharma suppressing truth about alternative medicine" more than the "9/11 was an inside job" thing. IMO, her woo is probably more dangerous because it might cause someone in the family to not receive proper medical treatment. I've already made it clear to her that if I'm seriously ill, I want to go to what she would call a "Western" doctor.

I once brought up to her that the numerous studies on homeopathy showed no effectiveness whatsoever. She responded with, "Well, there are a lot more money behind those studies..." as if she were implying that drug companies are bribing every single medicine researcher in the world to come up with sham studies.

My ex MIL believed that AIDS was developed by the US gov't to kill people off.
I pointed out that it was not particularily effective then since the flu killed more people.
Later she opined that it was a 'gay' disease.
I mentioned that this was not the case in Africa where prostitution is a major cause of the spread.

He says that more people die from the flu vaccine than from the flu itself. Like usual, he provides no studies or evidence to support his claims. Vaccines have never been shown to cause neurological disorders or sickness, beyond that sore arm you get when you get stabbed in the arm with a needle.

I once brought up to her that the numerous studies on homeopathy showed no effectiveness whatsoever. She responded with, "Well, there are a lot more money behind those studies..." as if she were implying that drug companies are bribing every single medicine researcher in the world to come up with sham studies.

Uck. Sad how people caught up in CTs/woo just will... not... THINK. They fear critical thinking. If they sat and thought about this stuff with objectivity and clarity, they would see logic holes in their theories big enough to pilot aircraft carriers through.

My husband is again pushing the conspiracy stuff on me, as of last night. I told him to back off, and it made him mad (he hasn't gone back to being verbally nasty with me, thank goodness; these days, he just sulks). I just can't help but compare CT to an evangelical religious mentality wherein the True Believers simply must proselytize, largely to seek validation for their own beliefs.

My husband is way down the rabbit hole again. And this two-year plus roller coaster with him (he fell down the hole in summer of 2008) has shown me that people who want to believe this stuff just won't respond to rationality, or if they do, they won't respond to it for long. When people want to believe things, there isn't a lot that facts can do to change their minds. It's like a religion. It struck me when he had some of the CT crap on last night, how the CT believers evangelize their cherished dogma. Their new word for "heretic" is "debunker."

Why would CTs want to believe these things without doing even the most rudimentary checking or making even the slightest attempt to educate themselves about science, politics, finance, history, etc.? Well, the reasons surely vary from individual to individual, but in my husband's case, I suspect he has a deep need to see the world as a Very Bad Place (a scapegoat for the disappointments of his life).

Hypatia,

You have my deepest sympathy, I am in a similar situation (for quite a bit longer than two years) being married to someone who seems to be into just about every CT there is (the latest being FOTL....). I don't mind so much that a person has a different take on issues and I know it is well intentioned in my case but draw the line at being told I am stupid/programmed/sheeple etc. etc. if I disagree with or question some sweeping statement of one form or another or object to the continuous goal-post moving in any attempt at rational discussion. I even went to a Richard Gage presentation once, but the fact that I was not convinced (that's my polite view of the arguments presented) is now cited as the pivotal point where I ruined the marriage. All I can say is keep holding your ground (I am sure you do from the tone/content of your posts) and trust that some sort of sense might eventually prevail, more likely through self-revelation than rational argument though I think. All the best for 2011.

being married to someone who seems to be into just about every CT there is (the latest being FOTL....).

This is one of the worst to talk them out of, believe me I have tried.
It would appear that losing their homes cars and liberty doesn't even snap them back into reality.
it re-enforces the belief in it.

You have my deepest sympathy, I am in a similar situation (for quite a bit longer than two years) being married to someone who seems to be into just about every CT there is (the latest being FOTL....). I don't mind so much that a person has a different take on issues and I know it is well intentioned in my case but draw the line at being told I am stupid/programmed/sheeple etc. etc. if I disagree with or question some sweeping statement of one form or another or object to the continuous goal-post moving in any attempt at rational discussion.

Yes! Same here. I'm fine with agreeing to disagree, but I draw the same line that you do.

Quote:

I even went to a Richard Gage presentation once, but the fact that I was not convinced (that's my polite view of the arguments presented) is now cited as the pivotal point where I ruined the marriage.

I notice the same tendency in my husband. He gets so upset and offended if I disagree with him on anything.

Quote:

All I can say is keep holding your ground (I am sure you do from the tone/content of your posts) and trust that some sort of sense might eventually prevail, more likely through self-revelation than rational argument though I think. All the best for 2011.

Thanks so much, Grassy Knowlington (love your name ). That's what I'll continue to do. Much as I love my husband, and I still do even though I shake my head at what he wants to put in his mind, I can't go down wackywoo rabbit holes. And wise words, "through self-revelation." That seems, indeed, to be what is happening.

Hang in there. You have my sympathy, too, and I wish you the very best in dealing with this. How do you and your hubby get along? Do you spend much time together? Lately, my husband and I spend very little time together -- he does his thing, I do mine, and then during the brief time we're together, we can get along. It's working all right, but a little lonely (though better than fighting).

This is one of the worst to talk them out of, believe me I have tried.
It would appear that losing their homes cars and liberty doesn't even snap them back into reality.
it re-enforces the belief in it.

Ah. Does this "Movement" happen to be most active in England? Because that's the place the OP of that thread was talking about.

Strange that I've never heard of that until now, not even from Alex freaking Jones. Or whale.to. Someday I want to take every single page on whale.to and dissect it piece by piece.

(True story: Our family was coming home from a road trip when we saw a tiny house in the countryside with various anti-NWO signs, one of them reading "WHALE.TO." Thankfully, nobody but me realized that it was a web address. .to is a very strange web address.)

Yes! Same here. I'm fine with agreeing to disagree, but I draw the same line that you do.

I notice the same tendency in my husband. He gets so upset and offended if I disagree with him on anything.

Thanks so much, Grassy Knowlington (love your name ). That's what I'll continue to do. Much as I love my husband, and I still do even though I shake my head at what he wants to put in his mind, I can't go down wackywoo rabbit holes. And wise words, "through self-revelation." That seems, indeed, to be what is happening.

Hang in there. You have my sympathy, too, and I wish you the very best in dealing with this. How do you and your hubby get along? Do you spend much time together? Lately, my husband and I spend very little time together -- he does his thing, I do mine, and then during the brief time we're together, we can get along. It's working all right, but a little lonely (though better than fighting).

Thank you. We tend to do our own thing too but we can also have good times together. It's tough though and does get argumentative, I try to avoid/minimise this but sometimes there's just too much provocation. And thank goodness for these forums, helps me maintain perspective. Sorry if I misled in any way - I am the husband.

Thank you. We tend to do our own thing too but we can also have good times together. It's tough though and does get argumentative, I try to avoid/minimise this but sometimes there's just too much provocation. And thank goodness for these forums, helps me maintain perspective. Sorry if I misled in any way - I am the husband.

Oh! Thanks for the clarification, hehe! Yeah, my husband and I can have good times together. There are things we just can't talk about without fighting, but after two years of this, we've pretty much learned to let those things slide. And he isn't into as much of the out and out crazy stuff as he was into two years ago, thank goodness, so that makes it easier, too.

I wouldn't be so sure. The wiki article is kind of sloppy in its writing, if not out and out wrong. Here is the offending sentence:

Quote:

However, side-effects from the vaccine caused five hundred cases of Guillain–Barré syndrome and 25 deaths

I don't know about the deaths, but I know that the vaccine most certainly did NOT cause 500 cases of GBS. We did the math on that last year in this forum (skeptigirl and Linda were involved, I think), and based on the epidemiological studies, the actual number of GBS cases that can be attributed to the vaccine were on the order of 20 - 30. IIRC, the incidence rate increased from something like 1 in 250 000 for the corresponding non-vaccinated population to 1 in 150K for the vaccinated population. With something like 10 million vaccinated, that's 30 extra cases of GBS in the vaccinated population.

I don't know where the 500 number comes from, but we were working with the published epidemiology study.

__________________I have a permanent room at the Home for the Chronically Groovy - Floyd from the Muppets